Photo Safe Guides

Photosafe Guides

In our album design software you may see blue lines around the page edges. These are there as guides for the album designer, and don't print. We recommend that you keep critical image areas (such as borders, text, heads) inside the guides, especially if a flushmount copy is to be made. Here's why.

1. All our albums are trimmed after we've made the page block, which removes 2mm or so from the edges of the book. If there is critical imagery close to the page edges it may look unsightly or even get trimmed away. This is perfectly normal in the publishing industry, where images often "bleed" to the page edge, especially in magazines. Designers understand that they're going to lose a sliver of image to the guillotine.

2. Many of our albums are delivered with small "copy albums", where the page layouts can be scaled down to as little as a third of their original size. But the trimming does not scale: the copy will lose 2mm, just like the big original, which can represent up to three times as much lost from the original file. That's why we display the photo safe guides more like 12mm (1/2in) from the edge, not say 3mm (1/8in).

By the way the same thing applies to the page gutter (spine of the book) where panorama apertures (crossing the spine) are split in some of our page types. Even if they're not cut, placing something important, like the bride's face, in the gutter will look quite unfortunate.

Warning! Both Photojunction and Workspace display photo safe guides, but other design tools may not. We cannot take responsibility for the loss of critical image data placed too close to the layout edge or gutter.

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